1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a compound useful for antiviral treatment and prevention of virus-induced diseases, and a pharmaceutical composition including the same.
2. Description of Related Art
Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) has broken out in an area around Canton, China in November, 2002 and spread all around the world. The syndrome features such symptoms as fever, difficulty in breathing, atypical pneumonia and the like. The cures for the syndrome have not been revealed sufficiently. Some practitioners treat patients with antibiotics or antiviral drugs but the effect is not satisfactory and the death rate keeps on increasing. This calls for immediate development of effective cures for SARS. The present invention is based on this pressing need.
Most antiviral drugs developed to treat virus-induced diseases target on protein that is essential for viability of the virus. Such drugs seem effective at first but virus acquires resistance to the drugs soon in the course of treatment period. This is because virus protein mutates rapidly, and the drugs targeting the protein do not work for the virus any more.
Therefore, it is important to prevent virus from acquiring resistance to drugs. One of the solutions to this problem is to develop a drug targeting a specific structure of ribonucleic acid (RNA) in viruses instead of targeting protein, because resistance to site-specific mutagenesis emerges relatively slowly. However, there is few compound developed as an antiviral drug targeting RNA structure. An RNA pseudoknot structure is a novel target, which is an essential factor for −1 ribosomal frameshifting, an important mechanism of protein synthesis in SARS coronavirus.